This year marks the 100th anniversary of the
start of World War I, the 75th anniversary of the start of World War
II and the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, so it is
appropriate to reconsider two symphonies that were explored in November 2011,
when we looked at the music of the First and Second World Wars.

In my World War II montage, I sampled a pair of Russian
symphonies, one by Shostakovich (his Leningrad symphony) and
Prokofiev’s fifth. In 1944, Prokofiev moved to a composer's colony
outside Moscow in order to compose what would turn out to be the
most popular of all his symphonies, both within Russia and abroad. He gave out
in a statement at the time that he intended it as "a hymn to free and
happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit." He added
"I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and
clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul."

Both Scandinavian composers Carl Nielsen and Jean
Sibelius wrote important symphonies during the 1914-18 war. Nielsen’s Inextinguishable
symphony (no. 4) and his untitled no. 5, foreshadowing Prokofiev’s statements,
considered the human spirit and how it emerged from the conflict. As the title
of his symphony suggests, the human spirit was indeed inextinguishable in spite
of the horrors of the War, and the human spirit emerges victorious in a
showdown between the orchestra and kettle drums that mark the apotheosis of the
fifth’s first section.

The 1910s were a decade of change for the symphonic form
which had existed for over a century. Meanwhile, various landmark works in
other genres had presented further radical developments. In 1909 Schönberg
continued pushing for more dissonant and chromatic harmonies in his Five
Pieces for Orchestra. From 1910–1913 Igor Stravinsky premiered his
innovative and revolutionary ballets. Ravel and Debussy were at
work developing and performing their Impressionistic music.

Though having spent nearly 30 years in the public spotlight,
Jean Sibelius found his works receiving poor reviews for the first time and he
was beginning to sense his own eclipse as a contending modernist. The moid-1910
saw Sibelius at a crossroads of sorts, forcing him to choose between changing
his style to fill the more modern desires of audiences or continue composing as
he felt best fit.

Sibelius was commissioned to write his fifth symphony by the
Finnish government in honor of his 50th birthday, which had been declared a
national holiday. The first version of this symphony (1915) kept his orchestral
style (consonant sonorities, woodwind lines in parallel thirds, rich melodic
development, etc.) while further developing his structural style. The structure
was firther refined in a revised (1919) version, which is the one we hear most
often.